Much More than Carnival and Rio de Janeiro
HAVANA TIMES – My relationship with Brazilian culture was always more or less the same as most Cubans have. It was influenced by what I saw in the soap operas that have been airing on national television every other day for the past 40 years.
These shows present a Rio-centric vision of Brazilian culture. The beach, carnival, Sugarloaf Mountain, coconut water, and samba.
A slice of reality where places like São Paulo and Curitiba are shown only as complementary alternatives, and the northeastern region of the country is just a blurry hell from which some characters manage to escape.
The rest is a void.
I don’t want to, nor do I have the right to, question the outward projection of Brazilian culture. I haven’t even spent two years in this country, and I’m far from knowing how its ministries work, or who pulls the strings and how they do it.
What I can do is reveal what my eyes see, and my ears hear.
Brazil is a huge country, a federation. Twenty-six large countries could fit inside it, and in fact, that’s the number of states it’s divided into. They are united by a language and share general traits that identify them, but also have hundreds of characteristics that diversify them according to each region.
The Carioca imagination (a term related to Rio de Janeiro) is just one piece of the Brazilian cultural mosaic.
When I first arrived in Brazil, I passed through the state of Roraima in the north, and then, a bit further south, I spent a couple of weeks in Amazonas before finally settling in Paraná. I can affirm that these are different realities, and none of them resemble the soap operas broadcast in my country.
Then, here, talking to people from different places, I’ve continued to put together my own vision of the mosaic, and I keep confirming the variety of accents, slang, customs, traditions, imaginations, phenotypic traits, and moral and psychological characteristics.
Although I still dream of admiring the landscapes of Rio de Janeiro from that famous cable car and swimming at that beach where the characters play volleyball and drink coconut water, now I want to see the unparalleled beauty of Salvador de Bahia, walk across that street in Rio Grande do Sul that marks the border with Uruguay, and explore the beaches of Florianópolis and the rest of the magical places within this gigantic country, each with a story to tell.